Osteotomy is a surgical procedure generally used for relieving pain in arthritis, to align a bone which bulges abnormally following a fracture or to shorten or lengthen the bone. Osteotomy involves making singular or multiple cuts into the bone followed by removal of a piece of bone present near a damaged joint.
The piece of bone is typically removed by segmenting the bone with the use of a cutter.
A variety of surgical techniques are required for segmenting a piece of bone. The success of the variety of surgical techniques relies on the preciseness with which a cut is made. An imprecise cut can often lead to severe injuries to patients. Even, unnecessary trauma can be caused to tissues surrounding the piece of bone leading to an increased recovery period.
Generally, cutting guides are employed for straight accurate cuts while performing osteotomy. The cutting guides are fixed on bones/plates with the help of connecting means and have an opening for incorporating a cutter e.g. a saw. The cutter is guided along the opening and a cut is made on one side of a bone for segmenting the bone. For bone segment removal the guide can be removed and then re-fixed in order to make a second cut alternatively guides have two or more slits for cuts. However, as the cutting guides are removed and fixed for each cut, accurate parallelism between cuts is difficult to maintain.
Recent development in the cutting guides involves two set position guides for excising bones. However, the length of cut in these types of cutting guides is fixed restricting them to be used for cuts of variable length.
In the light of the foregoing discussion, there is a need for a device for precise excision of the bones over a varied length. Also, the parallelism between the cuts should be maintained.
A problem has therefore been that the variable lengths of cut are predetermined and little flexibility is provided as to where these may be formed because of the fixed alignment of holes.
One object of the present invention is to provide a device for precise segmenting of a bone.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a device for maintaining parallelism while segmenting a bone.
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide a device for enabling variable length of cuts on a bone.